Here we’ll cover what BEC attacks are, how they work, what they usually look like, and how to handle them.What is a BEC Attack?7 Common BEC Attack PatternsTop Identity Deception TechniquesHow Can BEC Attacks be Stopped?What's the Best Way to Recover From a BEC Attack?What is a BEC Attack?First, let me explain what a BEC attack is. In short, Business Email Compromise phishing occurs when...

Over the last five years, Business Email Compromise (BEC) has evolved into the predominant cyber threat businesses face today. Since 2016, businesses have lost at least $26 billion as a result of BEC scams and, based on the most recent FBI IC3 report, losses from BEC attacks grew another 37 percent in 2019—accounting for 40 percent of all cybercrime losses over the course of the year. The...

If you haven't deployed Domain-based Messaging Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) to protect your brand from being impersonated in phishing scams, there are pressing reasons to jump on it now. Without a doubt, these are extraordinary times for individuals and organizations alike as we've been forced to change the way we work, shop, play, and live seemingly overnight, and for far...

“At some point, Russian and Eastern European cybercriminals are going to start thinking to themselves, ‘Why am I spending all of this time and money setting up infrastructure and hiring malware developers when I can just send someone an email, ask them to send me money, and they’ll do it.’”For more than a year, this is a line we have used over and over again, expecting that some of the world’s...

With 60 million corporate employees working remotely due to the Coronavirus outbreak, cybercriminals are switching up their tactics in business email compromise (BEC) scams.In what has been called the "world's largest work-from-home experiment," organizations around the globe are being forced to quickly transition to a remote workforce, ready or not. Cybercriminals have opportunistically adjusted...

As if coronavirus hasn't put enough of a damper on vacation schedules this spring, corporate employees taking time off might want to rethink their "out of office" email settings for fear a different threat: Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams.Sure, the temptation to share humorous details about your big spring adventure can be irresistible for a certain species of corporate denizen (especially...

Business email compromise (BEC) has become the predominant cyber threat businesses face today. These basic social engineering scams are having a huge impact, to the tune of more than $700 million every month. To make matters worse, the recently-released Internet Crime Report from the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center shows that BEC isn’t going away any time soon, as losses from BEC attacks...

Editor's Note: This post originally appeared on the Microsoft Security blog and has been republished here. You already know that email is the number one attack vector for cybercriminals. But what you might not know is that without a standard email security protocol called Domain Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC), your organization is open to the phishing attacks that...

Receipts and invoices—two accounting powerhouses that require little introduction. But step a little further into the world of finance and accounts, and you can quickly become a fish out of water, as the terminology to this numerical land seems to multiply exponentially.That said, in some of our recent active defense engagements with BEC cybercriminals, we have observed a new way scammers are...

One of the trends that has been slowly creeping up across the BEC threat landscape is that actors are using other techniques in order to get money outside of an organization. While a traditional BEC attack includes instructions for wiring money outside of the organization, more and more actors are asking for a large number of gift cards instead of the classical request of “Please wire $30,000 to...

Business email compromise (BEC) fraud is a lucrative venture, and now that industry is expanding in a troubling way—by lowering the barrier to entry so that anyone with a couple hundred bucks can outsource a BEC attack. BEC criminals are organized, behaving in many ways like legitimate businesses. And just like any successful company in a growing industry, these criminals are looking to add...

Mergers and acquisitions can build your company's value overnight, but business email compromise (BEC) and data breaches can tear it down just as quickly. Too often, M&A announcements are followed by waves of BEC attacks against the companies involved, or by news that the target company was the victim of a data breach. To get the most value from a merger or acquisition, you need to know how to...